Bound
by Queen Happo
Summary: A monster made out of threads appears out of nowhere. It finds Hidan and saves him from his grave. Together, they embark on a journey to find the monster's master, and Hidan's only friend; Kakuzu. Ambiguous KakuHidan, M/M, violence, death.
1. Prologue

**Prologue**

Demise crawled through the forest of dead trees, where traces of its master took it. Signs of a fight were evident, but the body was gone. Demise raised itself into a sitting position and looked for anything to indicate where its master was, and then wailed at the moon when it found none. Where had the body gone? Demise needed its master.

A change in the wind brought forth another scent for Demise to sense. As nothing but a lump of black threads strung together around a weakly beating heart, Demise's senses were not sharp or refined, but it knew that something special lay before it. Crawling forth with arms made of threads, dragging its body forward, Demise made way for the Nara forest in the distance.

None disturbed it, as it crawled. Crossing the dead tree forest took over a full day at its slow pace, but Demise had been crawling for a very long time, and would continue until that one single heart stopped beating. Such was its role.

Upon reaching the forest a deer approached. Its thoughtful eyes curiously wandered over Demise's shape, but before it had the chance of flee, Demise let its black threads ensnare it. The deer tried to get away frantically, but Demise was at a safe distance from it, as it pierced the deer's flesh with its threads. When it let go the deer fell dead to the ground, and so the other creatures of the forest learnt to stay away.

Another day passed, and then a second, of Demise's lonesome journey. Dawn, day, twilight, night, nothing made a difference to it. It had no will of its own, just an instinct, an innate knowledge of what it was supposed to do. And now, that instinct made it search the forest. Traces of its master were vague, but traces of something else grew steadily closer.

Then came a sound. Someone, a human, was growling from the earth beneath. And somehow, Demise knew that this was it. Just a short distance from it was a hole in the ground, filled up with rock, and yet Demise sensed a presence beneath it all. An echo of a man.

The presence was related to its master, Demise understood. And so it crawled towards the hole, and when it was there, it started to clear it. Rock by rock, it reached down its threads to remove. It dug for hours and hours, until it saw what it had sensed. A male human, an associate of its master, someone who would help in the finding of the body. And he was broken.

The human head Demise had found was withered and weak, with his eyes closed. Bruised and dirty from the dust, he did not stir, as Demise picked him up. He groaned when Demise placed him up on the ground, but said nothing.

With the head found, Demise started to look for the rest. Everything was in pieces, but that could be fixed. Demise pulled up a leg, then a second, and pieces of a torso. When it found the still beating heart in the broken ribcage it made pause, before stroking the organ with its thread. The head groaned again, and so Demise let go, and simply brought the part to the surface.

The process had started at sunrise, and finished at sunset. All of the pieces had been collected, and when they had, the eyes on the head opened.

Demise could not read the emotion flickering across the head's face. It was not capable of such things, just as it was not capable of understanding the words coming from the head's mouth. Instead, it simply started to repair the human, piece by piece.

The head was the last thing Demise strung together. And then the human was whole again, with black stitches across every limb of his body. The laugh, Demise could understand.

Now they would find its master.


	2. Chapter One

**Chapter One**

His scythe was nowhere to be found, and his clothes were all tattered. Dried blood and dust covered him from head to toe, sticking to every part of his skin, which was now also littered with stitches. It felt like he had been revived, raised from his earthly prison, free to wander the earth again and do God's bidding.

Hidan laughed hoarsely because he could. Never had he imagined that he would have missed the sky so much. The colours, the light, it all created such a stunning and vivid picture. He stretched his arms to the sides, because he could, and basked in the glory which was freedom.

Kakuzu's monster, a mask Hidan did not remember, started to crawl away. It dragged itself forward so slowly, and looked truly pitiful.

"Hey," Hidan called after it. "Where are you going?" Could those things even talk? Could it hear him? It showed no sign to have registered Hidan at all, and so he walked towards it on wobbling, unsteady legs – weak by malnourish – and touched its back. Kakuzu's threads had always had a disgusting texture, slick and yet rough at the same time, but Hidan made sure to grab the threads still to stop the creature.

The monster ceased its crawling, and turned around to look at him with the soulless eyes of the mask. All of Kakuzu's masks had portrayed different emotions, from Hidan's understanding. Looking at the white mask with the wide empty eyes, and the absurd human shape of it, he read despair. But it said nothing.

After a prolonged eye contact with the mask, Hidan suddenly wondered why it was there. Following his burial, Hidan had been sure that Kakuzu would kill all of the brats and then come and get him. He had never once doubting his partner's abilities. But then time had passed, he never knew how much, and his faith had started to waver. Maybe Kakuzu, merciless and cruel as he was, had decided to leave Hidan in his hole. That thought had made him just as furious as it had made him frightened. And maybe, he had realized, Kakuzu had lost.

At the broken eye contact, the monster started to crawl away again, and Hidan decided that he might as well follow. Weak in body, it would be for the best to have a partner. Furthermore, there was nothing Hidan loathed as much as loneliness.

It was a good thing that the monster crawled at such a slow pace, Hidan thought. He kept up mostly by leaning against trees. He needed food, and his strength back, if he ever hoped to serve God again.

At the sighting of a rabbit, Hidan's eyes went wide with hunger.

"Kill it," he ordered the monster, but his words did nothing but scare away the animal. Angered, Hidan grabbed the monster's threads tightly. "Listen, I need food, seriously, so you've got to help me, got it?" he ranted feverishly against the creature. His voice was hoarse and filled with a hunger-induced panic, yet the creature showed no sign of understanding.

Gritting his teeth, Hidan let go of the threads. His stomach growled at him, but he could do nothing to help. Even a vegetable, or a fruit, would be welcomed at that moment.

The full moon shone down at him through the forest canopy, brightening up the path he walked next to the crawling monster. But what did light help him, when he had no direction and no fuel? Anger was rising in his chest, but he could not muster up enough energy to let it out, or channel it into something useful.

When he spotted a doe, he thought that he might be hallucinating. But then the monster beside him shot forth its threads, which impaled the animal mercilessly from every angle. The skewering made Hidan flinch, though he had never been bothered before by Kakuzu's threads. This time however, it reminded him of the shadow boy's binding shade. The shadow had bound him, and pierced his own flesh, and there had been nothing wonderful about that pain.

The monster retracted its threads from the carrion, and then continued to crawl. Its killing of the doe had been purely by instinct, Hidan guessed. His paralysis from watching the butchery continued until the monster had crawled past the dead doe, and only then did his hunger override any other emotion.

Raw flesh was not his favourite diet, but it was harmless to him, and he knew no techniques to create a fire. Therefore he just threw himself at the carcass without any idea of cooking, and tore off the skin before devouring the hot flesh. His nails, long and hardened from his abolishment under the earth, served him well in clawing it open. It had been a large doe, with plenty of meat, and he was determined to eat it all.

Savagely, Hidan chewed on flesh and bone, ate liver, kidney and heart and nibbled on bone. Frantic with his unbearable hunger, he wanted to leave nothing left. A normal human would have been dead in Hidan's condition, but he alone could experience this sort of extreme hunger. And following hunger was a morbid thirst.

Only the doe's skeleton and most of its skin was left when Hidan was done. He had ripped apart the deer's skin in two and tied it like a towel around his hip before he continued walking, following the monster's trail. It had left him when he ate, but now with renewed energy, finding it was easy. His thirst burned, but it was not as horrible to him as the hunger had been, so he bore with it. The constant level of pain his life underground had consisted of was something he had gotten used to, and even before that, Hidan had always known what it was like to endure suffering.

A stream of water pooled right before them when he caught up with the creature, a sign that maybe Hidan's misfortune and poor luck had finally turned. He crouched down before it and filled his cupped hands with water, which he drank to quench his thirst. At the taste of the cool liquid he vowed to drink the entire stream, and cupped hands of water again and again. Then, when he was satisfied, he started to scrub his body clean. The stream was hardly large enough for him to bathe in, so he was restricted to simply wetting his hands and rubbing off the dirt and blood that way. Careful not to tear up the stitches, something Kakuzu had always nagged to him about, Hidan cleaned himself dutifully in the small stream for as long as it took. With no mirror on his person, he had to rely on his gut feeling that he looked presentable, as he pulled one final hand through his hair to slick it back. It had grown much past his shoulders during the time he had been buried, but finding a barber was not on his priority list.

Then he was left to search for the monster again, but since it crawled it had left an easy trail to follow. By dawn, Hidan had caught up with it once more, right when they reached the outskirts of the Nara forest. A large field of wheat and barley stretched towards the horizon, presenting them with nothing else but grass as far as the eye could see. There was no road through it, but the creature crawled forward as always, and Hidan walked after it with few other options.

By sunrise, Hidan was severely bored with the lack of change in scenery, and the absence of action. His soundless companion especially made him anger.

"Where did you come from, anyway?" he asked the mask. It continued to crawl without acknowledging him, like a deaf dog, but Hidan continued. "You're not any of the masks he carried on his back, I know that. You're not his fire mask, not water, not wind, not lightening… and I know you're not earth, because that was Kakuzu's heart. So what the fuck? What are you supposed to be?"

No answer was given, so Hidan kicked its back. Even that action made no difference to the crawling creature, and Hidan started to wonder if it even belonged to his partner.

"Did Kakuzu keep you secret, huh?" he guessed. "Not that Kakuzu ever opened up to me or nothing, but he did tell me that he had five hearts. And only five." When he was silent, he could hear the steady heartbeats coming from the threaded monster. "So you're his lie, I guess. He kept a sixth heart stored away someplace else. That right?"

The silence from his monster for companion drove Hidan steadily angrier, but there was nothing he could do anything about. For the first few days in his grave, Hidan had screamed and talked endlessly, but then his voice had gone hoarse. With the thirst building, he had been unable to speak, and had been confided to his mind. He much preferred speaking aloud.

"So we're going to find him, right?" he asked. He paused to wait for an answer, though he knew he did not need to. "I am coming with only because you saved me," he explained. "I don't care for that asshole. But a favour for a favour, that's only fair, right?"

Eventually, later that morning, Hidan paused to rest. Ever since he had started to serve God his body had not worked like normal humans, aside from his immortality. He did get tired, hungry and thirsty, but he was often able to function just as well without satisfying those needs, though it pained him to do so. The knowledge that he would not die of starvation meant that he could go hungry for much longer than most people, but even so he preferred to eat, sleep and rest. So he decided to take a break, and he grabbed the creature's threads and kept it still as he slumped to sit on the ground.

The stitching itched, but he knew better than to scratch. What he would not give for a sacrifice, and an hour spent in meditation after the slaughter, at that moment. He missed wearing his pendant, his neck felt much too bare to be without it. If Kakuzu had picked up his pendant instead of his forehead protector after Hidan had been beheaded, then he was sure that he would not have lost against the shadow boy. That was a thought which had circled in Hidan's mind during his entire time spent in the grave. But now it made no difference, for he was free once more, and ready to serve God as he was meant to do.

Teeth sunk into his finger, and he bit off skin from the top of his thumb. The mask's soulless eyes followed his movements as Hidan painted the symbol of Jashin, the symbol of God, on his cleaned and pale chest. After some consideration, he reached over to the creature, and painted the symbol on the white mask as well, where its forehead was. Seeing the circle and triangle made him regain a sense of temporary peace.

With his mind at peace, Hidan lay down on the barley, finding that it tickled no more than the stitches did. He pulled out some of the threads from his companion and held them in a tight grip under his cheek as he rested on his side, to make sure that it would not stray away. What the threads were made of, he had no idea, but they felt like veins as he held them. At least they felt alive.

In the broad day light, Hidan fell asleep, gripping the threads.


	3. Chapter Two

**Chapter Two**

Crows cawed and circled him in the air, as Hidan's journey continued. It was his third day of freedom, and he and Kakuzu's creature, which he referred to as "Kuzu" in his own mind, had reached a lake. The fields they had crossed had been abandoned, as evident by their wild nature, but at the end of it Hidan had found a small shed where a farmer must have once lived. Hidan's joy had been unsurpassed when he had found a scythe, meant for reaping the fields as it were, and he had taken it with him. Soon they were bound to meet another person, and then God would be given another sacrifice.

It got easier with each day to treat Kuzu as a pet. Hidan could forgive it for not responding to him, if he saw it as a dumb animal.

"Still," he rambled on, as they walked along the waterline, in no clear direction. "It feels a bit lonely without that fucker. Not that I like him or nothing, but it was more fun to rile him up than it is speaking to a fucking sewn together heart with a mask like you, like a fucking lunatic, seriously."

The cawing persisted above him, but the sound did not bother him. The lake was tempting to bathe in, but he wanted to keep searching for a sacrifice, before taking any such pleasure for himself. Serving God was more important than keeping clean, and more important than chasing off birds.

Hidan scratched the stitches on his neck in boredom as he followed the aimlessly crawling monster, before he realized what he was doing. Quickly he withdrew his hand, not wanting a scolding from-

Hidan groaned so loudly that the crows scattered. "Why the fuck does that fucktard keep coming up in my head?" he questioned no one, angrily swinging his tool scythe. He pointed the edge against the monster. "You," he called with a dangerous tone. "You're just one heart. I probably wouldn't have been able to kill that old bastard when he had fucking five of you, but you're alone. I can kill Kakuzu for good, you know. Never have to bother with that old miser again…" He licked his lips, before making a swing with his weapon against the monster.

Instead of piercing the heave of thread, the blackness struck out against Hidan and crawled around the edge of the scythe, making it immovable. Forced to retreat, Hidan jumped backwards to escape the suddenly hostile monster. At a distance, he braced himself for the impact of a dangerous technique, readying himself for fire, wind, water of lightening, only to see the monster immediately drop the scythe again, and continue to crawl away.

Was it a challenge? Was it telling Hidan to try again and kill it? Once more, Hidan pondered on how the monster even thought.

"I'll let you go this time," he grumbled as he walked after it, picking up his scythe again on the road. "Kakuzu's damn lucky that I am such a nice guy."

Beyond the lake, Hidan and the monster reached a narrow road through a thick forest. It had been a long and lonesome walk, as the company Hidan found in the monster was lacking in all the ways that truly mattered. Yet he followed it, hoping for some sort of miracle, his prayers answered, that it would lead him somewhere worth his time.

Ever since his lame attempt at killing the thing, Hidan had not conversed with it. Much as he wondered why he had attacked it, he wondered even more why he was still following it, instead of setting out to search for sacrifices on his own. How far could a debt owed take him, in comparison to the service to God?

As he pondered on his next course of action, the monster suddenly stopped, in the middle of the path. It had never stopped unless Hidan had grabbed it before, so he quickly pulled out his scythe, readying himself. In the distance, he spotted what the monster must have sensed; first one human and then a second one. Two sacrifices.

Hidan grabbed the threads of the monster and pulled it off the road. So far, it had attacked any living creature that it saw, other than Hidan, and he could not afford to lose his first sacrifice in what must have been months to Kakuzu's heart.

"Stay here," he ordered the clueless creature with a hushed voice. He pulled out some of the threads and tied them hastily around a tree, all while the mask's soulless eyes stared at him indifferently. But it did not attempt to get away. "You trust my judgement more than Kakuzu ever did," Hidan muttered to it, before leaving.

The humans approached, and Hidan peeked out through the trees' cover. They appeared to be civilians, both women, carrying only crops. Hidan turned his gaze to the blue sky above, waiting patiently, though his body was itching for a fight, and his mouth thirsted for blood. The moment the women walked past he opened his mouth for a shout.

"Watch me, Jashin-sama, as I do your bidding!" he cried out as he sprang from the forest towards the chosen sacrifices. His scythe was rusty and not made for reaping humans, but he handled it like it was his old one with skill, and made a clear cut towards the first woman before he could even finish his shout. Her scream died when her neck was severed, but her companion's voice carried above even Hidan's. She started to run, but Hidan's strength had been returning steadily, and he took a quick leap to land before her.

The woman fell down on the ground, shaking, with her crops dropped and scattered around her. Middle-aged, black hair, and tears running down her cheeks defined her appearance.

Hidan pointed the scythe at her, letting the tip scratch her neck as he stared down at her pathetic figure. The rush from his last kill ran through his body in an almost perverse way, and he licked his lips as he witnessed her misery.

"Please sir, please," she sobbed. "I have three children, please spare me."

"Jashin-sama forbids mercy," he informed her, his grin spread with glee and arousal. He scratched her just enough to draw blood with the scythe, making her cry out, and as she clutched her wound and stared up at him with terror in her dark eyes, he lapped up the blood from the blade.

Entranced by his actions, her eyes never left him as his body turned black and white, transformed into the disciple of his wicked god in flesh. When he cut open his wrist, and moaned at the familiar pain, she scrambled away.

The pain from his cut excited Hidan, and he was shaking as he watched his blood fleck the earth to finish the rite as it should be done. He drew God's symbol on the ground with his blood, and felt a wave of pleasure only to see it finished. Finally he would feel that sweet rush of pain the way it should be experienced. Finally he would satisfy himself and God both.

The woman managed to stand up and she started to run. Hidan grinned as he watched her back, before he jabbed down his scythe through his left foot. It was hard to be as precise with pain as he liked to be, with only a scythe, but the suffering of the woman as she tripped still surged through his body. He had missed doing this, all that time he had spent immovable underground. Nothing in the world could compare to this sadomasochistic joy.

The woman was lying on the ground, and Hidan saw that she was losing much blood from the wound on her shoulder. If he played around with her organs first she would simply die by blood loss. There was no enjoyment in a death like that.

It was time to end it. He placed the scythe on the ground before him, and held the back of its head, directing the edge to his chest. His body started to tremble anxiously, and he could no longer contain himself. He drove the scythe right through his heart, and became overwhelmed with the ecstatic feeling. The blood rush, the arousal, his climax, all combined as he claimed her life. The feeling of his heart stopping was a sensation like none other.

Weak to his knees from the sensation, Hidan dropped to the ground. The scythe still impaled him as he lay in the symbol of God, showing his gratitude. As long as it pierced his heart he would not feel a single beat, and it was the best form of meditation and contemplation there was.

Hidan lay in the symbol of God for hours. He almost forgot how it was to live. Part of him was expecting to be rudely interrupted, but none bothered him, not even the black monster he was following. Eventually he simply stopped, and pulled the scythe out. His body regained its original colour, and he stretched his stiff body before getting up.

The dead women lying on the road were both lying in pools of their own blood, soiling their garments. Hidan had never been one for crossdressing, but even a woman's garb was better than itching deer skin, so he stripped the headless corpse of its pale green yukata. To give it something of a more masculine character he cut off the sleeves and tied the sash around his hip, rather than waist, and though it stopped at his knees it would do for the moment. The top half was stiff with dried blood from the woman's neck, but the taste, smell and look of blood had always been appealing to him, and it bothered him not.

"Well then," he said as he slung his scythe over his shoulder. "Time to get Kuzu-chan." The nickname sounded like part mockery, part endearing, as he said it.

Walking off the road back into the adjacent forest, Hidan looked for the tree which he had tied the monster to. He just needed to untie it, and then they would be on their way again, he thought as he looked around. His mood from before, when he had struck out against the monster, had been much lifted, and now he was eager again to find Kakuzu's body. But oddly enough, though he could recognize the trees, he did not find the monster anywhere. He looked further in, and started to look for the normal traces on the ground from how it crawled. No matter how much he looked, however, he found nothing. During his ceremony, the monster had disappeared.

It was gone.


	4. Chapter Three

**Chapter Three**

Seven days had passed since Kakuzu's heart went missing, and the stitches all across Hidan's body had all but vanished. Every time he paused in his search he would pray for guidance, but God never answered him. Maybe it was because it was not Hidan's duty to find the monster. He was not required to find it and find Kakuzu's body, and see him revived. God recognized that.

But he wanted to. It had taken him much angry ranting at nothing to realize that he truly wanted to help Kakuzu be restored to his old self. Even if it was only to return the favour, he wanted it done.

The forest was vast, and Hidan was well aware of the circles he had wandered in. He searched every part of it, and would look at any dark bush twice, in his desperate search. Screaming did not help, because the monster was deaf, Hidan figured, but even so he had yelled at it to stop hiding many times. The coniferous trees, so different than the bamboo forests of his home nation, were driving him slowly insane. There was just so much moss and root he could walk barefooted on, so many rabbits he had to eat raw, and so many falling autumn leaves that he could take before snapping.

"Give me some credit," he said aloud, in his habit of speaking to himself. "I haven't complained yet." But he said it without mirth.

That night he slept on fallen leaves as a poor and thin mattress over the hard ground. He regretted having cut off the sleeves on his clothes as the wind chilled him, and the next morning was no better. It got colder and colder, with each day that passed, and the leaves continued to fall. Hunting became harder to do, though at least he did not need to search for water, when the rain started to fall.

The third day of rain had Hidan sitting under a thick tree branch, to be shielded from the heavy fall. It poured down and clouded his vision completely, and made him freeze to his bone. His scythe, already an old tool, seemed to get rustier by the minute, and would soon be completely worthless.

He prayed, but there was no end to his streak of ill luck. Jashin cared little for disciples who could do nothing, so he understood why he was punished, of course. Rather than looking for some monster belonging to a heathen, he should have looked for more sacrifices. All that time spent under the earth had dulled his usefulness to God.

Hidan buried his head in his hands, and pulled up his legs to his body. He hated loneliness.

_The dark clouds had appeared on the sky over the course of a week, warning them for an upcoming storm, before the downpour truly started. Everything was wet at the first sound of thunder, from the fields surrounding their lonesome road to the hills ahead of them, and the forests in the distance of each side. Blue had been replaced by grim, autumn grey above them, just as red, yellow and orange had replaced the green of forests and grass for the last several weeks. Still the first real rain was a surprise for Hidan, who cursed at its cold when it started to pour._

_Just a few steps ahead of him, Kakuzu opened up an umbrella he had been carrying since they left the last town on their journey. As soon as it was opened, Hidan hurried up to walk right beside him, taking cover under it from nature's harshness._

"_What do you think you're doing?" Kakuzu asked him darkly, as his oddly coloured eyes glared down at Hidan. _

"_What do you think? You know how fucking stupid my hair gets when it's wet, seriously. All that wax and it just dies, no way I'm walking in the rain," Hidan replied, while running his fingers through his hair to make sure it was still intact. Kakuzu ceased his walking then, making Hidan stop as well to remain dry. Only when they were still standing did they become aware of just how close they had to stand in order for Hidan to remain under the umbrella. _

_No matter the intimacy, Kakuzu was still accusing, when he said: "When we were in the last village, I told you to get an umbrella for yourself, because there were clear signs of rain," with a dangerous tone. "And you said that it was not going to rain, and that even if it did, you would not need an umbrella."_

_His unspoken threats fell to deaf ears. "Yeah, well, I was wrong, you happy?" was Hidan's only retort, and then he sighed, and rolled his eyes. "Seriously dude, you're not gonna make me walk in the rain, are you? Because then I am going to whiny and bitch at you, and I am going to whine about my hair, and you're gonna get really pissed off and threaten to kill me but you won't, cause you can't, and then you'll just be in a way worse mood than you would have been if you just let me walk here with you."_

_The patter of the rain against the umbrella following the deadly silence told Hidan that he had won this round, so he smirked proudly just as Kakuzu wordlessly resumed walking. Sharing the umbrella with Hidan, as he did._

The humid air and the cold winds made Hidan's body damp, but it was almost too numb for him to be able to feel it. His head was hidden behind his legs as he hugged them, and his clothing was drenched from the blowing rain. He was lost. He hated that even more than he hated loneliness.

"For fuck's sake," he started another prayer. "Just… I am gonna be a good servant, you know that I am the best you could imagine. But Kakuzu, heathen bastard as he is, serves you too. Do you know how many people he's killed over the years? It must be a fucking insane amount. And when he lets lose, he kills fuck ton more than I've ever managed."

Was he defending Kakuzu to Jashin? The bizarre concept made him want to chuckle, but it was so cold that his teeth just ended up chattering. "Just… for fuck's sake, help me out here!" He yelled the last part, but his voice was drowned out by the rain.

And then his prayers went answered. He heard something approaching, and that noise alone seemed to cure his cold body, and he was able to quickly get to his feet. It sounded like something heavy being dragged across the ground, but when he spotted what it was; a big lump of black thread with a white and black lined mask, he ran out from his cover towards it at once.

He was laughing, he realized when he reached the ugly monster. "Where the fuck have you been?" he yelled, but the joy in his voice made the curse insincere. The creature did not answer, but it did let Hidan pull it under the thick branch again for cover. There they sat, staring at each other, with Hidan's grin being unable to go away.

"I was almost fucking worried about you," Hidan told it. "You might be Kakuzu's heart, but you're weak, aren't you? You can't even walk, you just crawl, how lame's that?" He let out a crazed giggle. "Well, don't worry Kuzu, I'm here to protect you," he mocked.

Or maybe he was serious. Even he was unsure, as he looked at the odd creature until the rain finally stopped. Grasping the threads, he felt a sense of hope rekindled once more. Where had it been? What had it done, in Hidan's absence? Had it been as lost as he?

The stiff mask and the soulless eyes of the monster remained unchanging as Hidan grinned at it, giving no answers to any question raised. But the heartbeats from within its threaded body seemed louder than before, when Hidan's grip tightened.


	5. Chapter Four

**Chapter Four**

The women Hidan had sacrificed before the downpour started must have come from a village, he reasoned. For two days he and the monster walked about the forest in search of the path they had originally staved off from, and finally found it after a hunt of fox with his bare hands. The rusted scythe, he had left I the depths of the woods.

Unarmed, he felt restless, even though he was walking next to a living-weapon. But his body had regained much of its physical prowess, so he did not experience any fear for what he would do in combat. It bothered him that he would not be able to sacrifice someone properly, nevertheless.

"But you know, my nails are pretty sharp. More like claws, seriously. Think I can use them to kill myself?" he asked the monster casually. He scratched at his own chest, digging the nails into the skin, and pulled. "Fuck," he moaned. "Yeah, I can probably do that."

As usual, he received no reply.

"I don't know if I prefer Kakuzu's ridiculous death threats over your silence or not," he lied to the monster.

The path through the forest was short, made longer by their slow pace, and brought them to an open meadow where a small community lay. It was a hunting village, with a few vegetable plantations, made of tree and with hay roofs. The entrance was an open gate, and without realizing that his appearance was bound to cause a stir, Hidan and the monster entered.

Roughly twenty of the wood and hay cottages surrounded the main road from which Hidan had walked, before it forked and stretched to two different and open gates on the other side. It was sparsely populated, and Hidan could see that the market was not open at the point of his arrival. Most of the villagers seemed to be working the plantations behind the houses, or were assumable off hunting, though a few children were playing on the street ahead of him.

It was a peaceful and calm atmosphere. And then a young girl spotted the monster and screamed.

The scream became an avalanche, and it was not long before heads turned from every direction to look at the commotion. Women and men came out from their homes, farmers left their fields and the children all ran.

A crowd gathered before Hidan on the main road, halting him in his steps, but they appeared to be nothing but courageous pacifists, rather than a militia. Bravery was shown on every face, but it was obvious from their state of dress that these were the people left behind as their hunters searched the forest for game.

One man stepped out from the crowd, as soon as it had been gathered. He was tall and balding, with a black beard and simple clothes, dressed mostly in his pure rage. "That's Tomoe's yukata," he yelled in fury, as he accusingly pointed his finger at Hidan. "We found her corpse a few days ago… You're the bastard who killed my wife!"

Hidan remembered the nude and beheaded woman only slightly, but the art of mockery had always been something he excelled at. The furious husband had a wakazashi in his sash, a weapon as good as any, so Hidan smirked.

"That was me all right. She was a fucking ugly bitch, I just had to kill her. I did the world a favour. She was a lousy cocksucker anyhow, and looked even more awful when I made her strip."

His words did their purpose in the offensiveness, and the man cried out in anger. He was probably a simple and retired huntsman, not built for combat, and he wielded his blade as if though it was a knife as he rushed towards Hidan.

The townsfolk whom were their audience yelled for the man to stop, but no one dared to interfere with his urge for vengeance, and let him run towards Hidan without aid. Hidan cracked his neck, before he sprang into action, rushing forward. He reached the man quicker than the man could blink, and easily disarmed him with a fast combat manoeuvre, a child's play for a shinobi. With the blade now in his hands instead, he laid a swift cut against the man's forehead; a shallow wound which always looked more dangerous than it was.

For sacrifice, the situation was not ideal for Hidan's purposes. A crowd of such size would not sit idly by, and if they fled whilst he was meditating his massacre could miss one or two. So instead, Hidan spun the man around and grabbed his wrists, locking them into a deadly grip behind his back. If he struggled needlessly, they would be dislocated.

"In which direction is Konoha?" Hidan asked the crowd. No one was brave enough to step forward, and those in the back were attempting to slip away without him noticing.

Hidan was not a believer of second chances. With one swift move, he had dislocated both of the man's arms, and slit his throat just as the scream was about to start. A terrified gasp spread through the crowd.

"Let me make this clear," he told them impatently. "You're all cursed already. Jashin-sama has passed judgment on you." Then, lying, he added; "But you can get salvation by giving me some fucking directions!"

After his show of cruelty, none defied him. An older woman stepped up, and said that she could tell him the road. She explained that she had often gone to Konoha to hire shinobi for missions, mostly rated D, and that she knew the road like the back of her hand.

Hidan could have asked for a map, but he had never been good with those. Instead he listened to the old woman, who tried so hard to not shake as he looked directly at her. Sweat was forming on her wrinkled forehead, her words started to fail her, and only when she managed to finish did she realize that Hidan had moved, and skewered her with the wakizashi.

Then the slaughter began.

_The battle was glorious. Four weeks had passed since Hidan had joined the organisation, and the weeks had been filled with trials to overcome. His would be mentor in the life of immortality, Kakuzu, had turned out to be a filthy heathen with a bad temper and an anti-social disposition. He placed his morality in the world of money, and embodied all that which Hidan loathed._

_But during battles, he was stunning. This battle was the first time Hidan had seen him go all out, with his skin torn open and threads and monsters tearing out. Every technique was powerful enough to level great landscapes, and the village which they had targeted stood little chance._

_Kakuzu's monsters shattered and destroyed every part of the village, and Hidan's job was to kill all those who fled. They were all blasphemers, sheep shepherds following teachings about mercy, and he slain them with delight. He danced a macabre dance with his scythe, felling all those who fled, but at times he would pause, just to marvel at Kakuzu's power._

_The destruction they caused was a thing of glory. As Hidan lay in his symbol of God impaled on his own command, after the fighting was over, Kakuzu came up to him. His robe was off, his monsters still searching for survivors in the ruins of the village, and he looked to Hidan like an entirely different man. Only his oddly coloured eyes remained consistent, as they glared down at Hidan._

_Deep in contemplation and prayer, Hidan did not speak as their eyes met. And at a loss for words, neither did Kakuzu._

_In the backgrounds, the monsters continued to wreck havoc, but Kakuzu sat down next to Hidan instead. Their silence was a rarity, but that time, they both cherished it. Maybe, thought Hidan, Kakuzu was not as bad a partner as he had first seemed. It was the first time he appreciated him._

_Their peace continued until the masks returned to Kakuzu's body. When he absorbed the awful monsters back into his body, he grunted, and then put his cloak back on._

"_Get up," he told Hidan. "We're leaving."_

"_I can't just leave in the middle of my prayer, you heathen bastard," Hidan argued. The glare didn't faze him, and he was allowed to finish._

_Only ruins and corpses remained when they left._

The village was a ghost town when Hidan was done. The monster, Kakuzu's heart, had helped in what little ways it could, but it had soon become apparent to Hidan that it was not a heart made for battle. It knew no Ninjutsu and could barely move around as it were, but he had been fortunate enough that no one had dared to attack it.

Hidan walked through the dead village with a disinterested disposition, though with a determination for his future. He looked through the houses, stalking for prey in form of hiding survivors, and looking for clothes to wear made for a man his size. In one house, belonging to a late seamstress, he found garments which fit him, and donned a pair of black pants with a dark blue kimono shirt. By the door he found sandals to wear, and next he looked for a place to cut his hair.

As he walked from house to house looking for tools and cowards to kill, the monster had started to crawl away. It crawled through the same gate where they had come from, towards Konoha, if the old woman was to be believed. Hidan soon followed it, when he had given himself a quick haircut and treated himself to uncooked pork chops, found at a butcher shop. Over his shoulder he slung a bag with collected tools and meat wrapped in linen, and he carried a butcher's knife and the wakizashi in scabbards tied around his hip. He looked more like the shinobi he was, but less like the Hidan he had been before, without the red and black robe, the pendant, and the looming figure of Kakuzu by his side.

"It'll have to fucking do," he mused aloud, when he walked next to the monster. For once in their journey, their path ahead was clear. "At least until we find him."


	6. Chapter Five

**Chapter Five**

An old woman had walked the path to Konoha frequently, so Hidan assumed it must have been easy. He remembered her description well, and walked back the way that he had come.

"So we took the wrong turn after we got out of the fucking fields," he commented to the monster cheerfully. "I got to kill some heathen scum, eat proper meat and get some clothes. That's worth the delay, seriously." He chuckled, as he looked up at the sky and the scattered moving clouds. "Kakuzu would bitch about it. He'd be all "Hidan, I'm gonna kill you if you make us late again", or some shit like that, right? He never gets that he's the problem. You know, if he'd just open up a bit, he'd be much more tolerable, am I right?"

As always, the creature deigned to give him any sort of agreement. Their walk had taken them through the forest path back to the lakeside, much smoother this time around, and now they were standing by the still water.

In anger, Hidan kicked at the ground with a clenched jaw, holding back a needless scream. The creature's soulless eyes bore into him when he looked down at it, and he could take it no longer.

"You're just as frustrating as he is!" he yelled. "Fucking answer me! I hate the silence treatment, don't you get it? Kakuzu you bastard, I know you're in there, I can hear your fucking heartbeat. You must be in there somewhere, and you're doing this on purpose, aren't you? You goddamn bastard. I could kill you now!"

But the creature just continued to stare at him as he ranted, never leaving him with its gaze. Hidan clenched his fist, and thought to punch it, putting just enough energy into his fist to shatter the white mask into pieces. He took a step towards the calm creature, and raised his fist. Last time he had attacked it it had responded, but he was faster than it, he was sure.

The silence and the stillness finally made him snap, and he threw the punch towards the mask. It would be the end.

"_Kakuzu, slow the fuck down," Hidan called after his companion, who kept a faster pace than him. They were climbing up a steep set of stairs, the steps being of old wood and taking them up a green hill. A canopy of trees covered the stairs well, and surrounded them and the hill entirely. Birds flocked and sang, and the greenery of spring was overwhelming._

_Kakuzu would not heed to Hidan's words, as he walked up the stairs. Hidan grumbled and cursed as he followed suite, sickened by the animals and lively colours already. His taste was for carnage and slaughter, not this serene form of beauty._

_They were supposed to be free for a couple of days. They had performed well, their leader said, and were not on an assignment at the moment. But Kakuzu had not cared for that, nor had he cared for Hidan's complaints, instead he had said that they were to find a bounty he had been searching for. His obsession for money, Hidan could not understand, and he found it appalling. _

_The trees blocked their view of how much further they would have to climb, and eventually Hidan decided to simply sit down._

"_Hey, shithead," he called to his partner. "Let's take a break. I'm not walking one more step." To prove his point, he sat down on the step and folded his arms. Kakuzu stopped in his ascent, and turned around to glare at Hidan._

"_No," he said. "Get your lazy ass up now."_

"_Fuck off, I'm not going one more step. It's tiresome, seriously. Plus, it's fucking unnecessary! We're not on an assignment. What the fuck do you need to hunt down this Koji guy for? Last time I checked, we were not running low on cash, you greedy fu-"_

_Kakuzu's iron fist connected with his jaw before he could even finish his sentence. The power behind it made him fly off the steps into the thick forest. After breaking through one tree, the second Hidan's body connected with stopped his flight, but just as his dizziness wore down Kakuzu was standing over him, with a dangerous glint in his eyes._

"_Money is important," he said. "It's the only thing in this world you can rely on. If you live long enough, you will realize that too."_

"_Fuck that shit, Jashin-sama is the only one I need to rely on," Hidan cursed as he rose to his feet. "And how dare you punch me? That fucking hurts." He threw a punch at Kakuzu, but his fist was caught almost before he could raise it._

"_You are tragically predictable," Kakuzu commented, his monotone voice dripping with condescension. He let go of the fist, and walked back towards the stairs with nothing else to say._

_Hidan considered staying put, but when he could no longer see Kakuzu's looming figure he hurried away after him still. Kakuzu was terrible company, but he was better than no one. _

Hidan stopped himself right before his fist connected with the mask. He cast his gaze downwards, with gritted teeth, and then started to walk along the lakeside again. He could hear the creature following, but kept staring at the ground.

The sun went down behind him, making his shadow taller and taller until the darkness was all-encompassing. That night he slept on a sleep roll he had brought from the village, but he did not grip the monster's threads to keep it from straying this time. Yet it remained by his side when he opened his eyes the next morning.

For the majority of the following day Hidan was quiet. They walked at the monster's slow pace back past the shed where he had found the now discarded scythe, and then alongside the wheat field again. It was a lonely road, and the sun hid behind clouds, but they were spared rain.

When they reached a hill, with a set of stairs to help one ascend it, Hidan spoke once more.

"I didn't mean to… you know, nearly kill you," he told the creature. He sat down on the old wood steps, with the monster stopping before him, looking at his face as always. Hidan tried to wave it away with his hand, but the gesture did nothing. "It's just fucking frustrating. You're frustrating. Like seriously, really fucking frustrating."

The inane rambling persisted for a while, but then he took a deep breath, and sighed. "I miss that bastard. I heard that he was immortal, so I thought that I should find him. And it took me ages to track him down, but I did, and I joined Akatsuki for his sake, and I even said that religion was a good source for money just so he'd let me partner with him. How fucking pathetic does that sound, right? But he was immortal, and I wanted to have someone… like me. Which turned out to be such a fucking joke, right? We couldn't be more different."

Hidan leaned forward, pressing his hands to his forehead as he did. He could not look at the monster as he talked, for he would be more honest if he thought no one heard. "But I liked him. God, I sound like such a loser, don't I?" He chuckled without mirth. "But I did. He always got my back, and he knew what immortality was like. We were great together."

"Even so," Hidan continued. "When I was buried... I really started to think he was dead. Because he's not immortal like me, he's just got five fucking hearts. Seriously, so lame." He glanced up then, looking straight at the monotone mask, and felt his mouth spread into a smile. "Well, six I guess." Rising to his feet, he started to climb the stairs. "Come on," he called to the creature. "Enough with that gay shit. Let's go save the old bastard, his corpse must miss being alive."

With the creature dragging itself up the stairs behind him, Hidan slowly climbed up the stairs. It took time to reach the top, but when Hidan started to see over the edge he ran up the last few steps. From the view on top of the hill, he saw the Village Hidden in Leaves, beyond a forest of large trees. And the village was in pieces.


	7. Chapter Six

**Chapter Six**

The forest Hidan and his monster companion had to cross to reach the shattered village was coniferous and deep. Hidan's travels had acquainted him with the huge trees of the Land of Fire before, but they still proved to be difficult for him to pass through, with the threaded creature's inability to jump. Walking at ground level was something for common people, and not shinobi like himself, but he was left no choice.

As they were walking on the ground path under the thick branches Hidan would normally seer over, he grew steadily more anxious. From his view on the hill he had seen that the Konoha of the past had been destroyed, though a new one seemed to have been built in its place. Still ruins had littered the place, and the ground surrounding the village had suggested a large war. A pity his own village had turned their back on such activities.

But the destruction had him worry.

"They must have taken his body to Konoha, to some morgue," he told the creature. "But I doubt they buried him. His body must have been examined, because it's seriously fucked up." He had no humour in his words. The nervous, quick way of speaking jarred greatly with his normal teasing tone. "But if the village was destroyed, what happened to the morgue? Is it still standing? Were they able to save the corpses?"

The creature opened the mouth of the mask, and let out a wail. It shocked Hidan so greatly that he flinched, and he looked wide-eyed down at the creature.

"Did you just answer me? We've been travelling together for at least two weeks, and only now do you think to say something?" But the mask had already reverted back to its stoic, unmoving state. Its eyes simply stared at him once more, as if nothing had happened.

Hidan kicked the ground. "I don't know what to do with you. Kakuzu was easy to read, but you're... well, I guess you don't really have a mind of your own, do you?" Nodding to confirm it to himself, Hidan added; "That explains it. You're just mindlessly following me. Well, not for much longer. 'Cause when we're out of these woods, we're gonna search every fucking part of that morgue, and we're gonna find Kakuzu's body, and he's gonna be all 'thank you Hidan-sama, you have saved me'. All right?"

The monster's only reply was in following him as he continued walking.

For the evening sleep evaded him, and they kept up their pace. Eating he did as he walked, but hunger also was not a priority. He tried to sing to calm his nerves, but his voice fell flat, and he could think of no song to fit the mood. Eventually he settled on humming an unknown melody, but even so his body was tense.

Admitting his worry aloud was a hard thing to do. But when they reached the gates of Konoha, and hid from the guards behind the large trees surrounding it, he was biting his lips till they bled. The blood reminded him suddenly of his deity, so he turned his gaze to the sky.

"Jashin-sama," he prayed as he pressed a clenched fist to his lips. "I haven't prayed for a while. Sorry 'bout that." The cultists who had introduced him to God had given him very few guidelines beyond the rules for killing, and rituals of contemplation. He knew not how to properly address a god. But he did as best he could, as he confessed to Jashin. "I should be back on schedule when Kakuzu's back with me. He helps with the reaping of heathens. It'll all be as it should with him here again." He closed his eyes for a long time, focusing only on calming his breathing. Meditation was something he should get good at, if he planned on continuing his immortal existence, Kakuzu had told him once. Hidan thought he did all right.

"Wish me luck," he said to God, before he and the creature left the scene to circle the village, and find the morgue.

Bringing the monster into the village would be an impossibility. But would it stay if he left to bring Kakuzu's body out? Or would it stray off again?

They had stayed still at the same spot near the end of the mountain shielding the village, for a long time already, as Hidan pondered on what his next move would be. Normally, he would have preferred a more direct approach, but caution was the key this time around. The shadow boy was from Konoha, and though Hidan felt confident that he would not fall into the same trap twice, he was too close to his goal now to take any unnecessary risks.

After tying the monster to two separate trees, praying it would work this time, Hidan snuck into the village in the guise of darkness. The bottom of his kimono he had cut off and tied around his head like a scarf, and it hid his identity well enough.

He had heard of the poor guarding of the Village Hidden in Leaves, but with the high walls surrounding it gone as well, the security was poorer still. Hidan managed to blend in easily with the sparse population, keeping his head tilted down to avoid anyone seeing, and thus remembering, his face.

The village itself was very different from his own hometown. The buildings were mostly of wood, built close to each other, with wires and poles down every street. Most windows were dark, but the few lit ones showed bright colours and families, and porches with flowers. There was a picturesque feel to half of the village, while the other half showed a devastating ruination.

By the base of the cliff was the Hokage's office, from the looks of it. Hidan made his way there, subtly avoiding any street with more than one person crossing as he walked, on the lookout for anything resembling a prison. Adjourned to the office building, once he reached it, he saw a long but short building, and immediately recognized the shape of it as a jail with underground cells. The body of Kakuzu must have been taken to a morgue there, to be studied by the surgeons of Konoha.

Hidan was not the stealthiest of shinobi, but he was not ranked an S-class criminal in the bingo book solely for his immortality. Disguising his presence, he subtly moved towards the prison. After circling it, he found only one entrance, at the back of the building. He waited next to it until a guard exited, and without wasting any time he quickly made a stab through the man's skull. The body fell to the ground, and Hidan dragged it off into the bushes, before he entered the facility.

The door shut behind him, Hidan advanced towards the sounds of stepping feet. He would leave no survivors, a task he excelled at. Oft he would take joy in his battles, but now he made every slice clean and precise, so that there would be no chance he left anyone alive.

As with the security outside, the guards of the prison were few, and Hidan disposed all he met with trained ease, in his quest for the morgue. Every wall of the place was of grey concrete, and the doors he passed were of metal with shut lids, marked with numbers. He passed a shut door with the sign above it reading "Torture Room", and just the fact that there were others parts than a prison in the building made him positive.

Another flight of stairs downward, and he found himself in front of the morgue. His hand almost trembled, like he was a fresh shinobi on his first mission, when he turned the lock open with keys taken from a guard's corpse. He looked for signs for seals on the door, or a barrier of sort, but the security was very much lacking, it seemed. After turning the key, he simply pushed the door open. And he entered the morgue.

"Shimura, how can it take you so long to get some coffee?"

Those were the last words said by the shinobi seated on a chair in the morgue, when he turned towards the opening door. Shock read on his face when he saw that it was an intruder with a bloodied blade, but his face lost all expression when it was cleft in two by Hidan's quick draw of his wakizashi. All killing done on his quest down to the morgue had been without prayer or ritual, but it had been necessary.

The morgue had a wall much like every exchange office for bounties Hidan had been inside, ever since he started to journey with Kakuzu. He walked up to the hatches, all with a name on them, and looked for the one which read Kakuzu. Over three hundred bodies were preserved in the morgue in three levels, and Hidan decided to simply start from the right, and work his way left. Every name on every hatch he read, and though he was in a hurry, he made sure that he did not miss a single name.

Every sign started to blend together, the longer he spent trying to find Kakuzu's name, but he did not give up. He was getting closer and closer to the left wall, unknowing of how much time had passed, before his heart fluttered as he read "KAKUZU" on a hatch, finally. Wasting no time, he grabbed the hatch and opened it, pulling out the brig and revealing the body. The corpse of his only friend.


	8. Chapter Seven

**Chapter Seven**

The remains of Kakuzu were almost unrecognizable. The Leaf shinobi who had done the autopsy had been unable to close the scars, if they had tried at all, and the lifeless crass threads hung out from every wound. The corpse didn't look as much as a body as it appeared to be a broken doll, with rips in the fabric no one had bothered to sew up.

Rather than relief, Hidan felt a wave of anger, as he witnessed the corpse. He clenched his jaw, and grabbed Kakuzu's shoulder, digging his nails into the skin.

"Why did you lose?" he asked. "Why the fuck did you lose, huh?" Kakuzu's body was lying on its stomach, and Hidan grabbed both shoulders, pulling it up just to shake it. Kakuzu weighed very little, and was even lighter in death. Hidan started shaking the body, and repeated the question, until his eyes met Kakuzu's.

The bizarre combination of green and red which had been Kakuzu's eyes was gone. A simple white replaced his entire eyes, and appeared just as empty as the mask of his final monster. In disgust, Hidan dropped the body, and fell to the floor just as the corpse hit the brig.

"Goddammit," he muttered to himself. He had reached his goal, but found no satisfaction in his discovery. Seeing Kakuzu truly dead had made his blood turn to ice, and no matter how hard he shut his eyes, he could not get away the picture of the white eyes of Kakuzu's corpse. He tried to think of the still beating heart of Kakuzu's, left out in the woods, but his mind only focused on the soulless eyes of the mask, just like the still eyes of Kakuzu's corpse.

He was scared of death. Immortality had tempted him so, because of his fear. With Kakuzu, he had felt safe. No one could kill them, and they could have each other for an eternity. But the reality of the lifeless body on the brig above him, with the open wounds, slacking threads and empty eyes was impossible to ignore, and Kakuzu's death was as real as Hidan's own life.

But it didn't have to be. Hidan could give Kakuzu his life back, and make it all go back to the way it should be. It had been a bump in the road, nothing else; their entire battle against the shadow boy and his friends. Soon, things would be as they should be, Hidan reasoned as he stood up once more, and heaved Kakuzu's corpse over his shoulder.

Even though Kakuzu was a tall and burly man, he was easily slung over his back. Hidan did not know how much time he would have before someone was foolish enough to cross his path, but subpar as the security was, it was impossible that a shinobi village would not soon find out that something had happened at the prison facility. With a tight grip of Kakuzu's legs, as Hidan let the corpse hang over his back with the arms over Hidan's shoulders, he started to sprint as fast as he could with the liability. By leaning forward, he was able to run fast through the corridor, and back up the stairs he had ventured down.

The corpses of the security had bled all over the floor as he reached the upper levels. He almost slipped on it, until he focused his chakra in his feet, and stayed upright. But then, as he finally was at the last flight of stairs up to ground level, he heard voices.

"What the..." a man said, and at the same time a woman screamed "there's been a jailbreak! Call for backup!"

Hidan quickly pressed himself against the wall, trapping Kakuzu's body between himself and the concrete surface, as he hid. If they had thought someone had broken out, they would not search the inside, he told himself. Patience, wasn't that what Kakuzu had always gone on about?

He waited until he heard the voices fade away, but just as he readied himself to make a run for it, the woman's voice from before said that she would look for survivors. Hidan cursed at the distraction, but knew that he had no choice but to drop Kakuzu's body. It hit the floor with a hard thud, and then Hidan unsheathed the wakizashi, and ran up the stairs with determination to end the life of the woman before she could even scream.

But when Hidan reached the top level he saw no trace of the woman, or any other living shinobi. He had never been able to sense chakra, so he turned around in confusion, looking for places where she could be hiding. Maybe she had heard the thud and hidden in the locker, he thought, and approached the lockers with intent to slice through the metal itself. He simply needed to kill her and be done with it; that was the plan.

Instantly after he raised his blade Hidan experienced the familiar feeling of death. In confusion, he looked down at the sword piercing his heart, sticking out from between his ribs. The woman had snuck up on him, and was now standing right behind him.

"Bitch," he groaned at the same time as he spun around and cleft her head in two with his blade. He reached around his back and pulled out her sword with a grunt at the pain, and threw it to rest next to her dead body. "That fucking hurt." But it was done, and now he could retrieve Kakuzu's body again. Soon it would all be back to normal.

The forest's gnarling roots, thorny bushes and mossy ground was even harder to cross with a body on his back, but Hidan couldn't recall a single memory ending in his surrender. He just kept on jumping upwards the slope of the forest, towards the trees where the monster was tied. It wasn't far, though the terrain made his ascent more difficult than it should be, but soon he was standing at the same level as the monster.

Upon seeing Kakuzu's corpse, the creature started to wail again, and fight against the restraints. Hidan laid down Kakuzu's body on the ground before it, and ran to untie the knots. Unconsciously, he was grinning, filled with an extreme sense of anticipation.

It was at that moment, when Hidan was grinning and untying the monster finally, that a kunai with an explosive tag came flying towards them, from someplace up in the trees. He just barely saw it before he managed to jump in its path, and take the hit to his own body, in protection of the fragile creature. He withstood the pain, and looked around for the perpetrator, anxious, and protective of Kakuzu's final heart.

As he looked around, worried only for the sake of the monster, his mind was racing. How had they found him so quickly? A trail of blood on the ground was leading to him, he noticed then, coming from the wound in his back.

Behind him, the monster kept wailing, and reaching with its freed threads towards the corpse. This was no time to be gentle, not when the mask was so vulnerable, so Hidan drew his wakizashi quickly and cut the creature loose. Its painfully slow pace was sped up with its desire to reunite with Kakuzu, Hidan could tell, as it crawled with the cut off threads and pitiful arms towards the corpse.

The shinobi Hidan assumed had thrown the kunai suddenly showed themselves, in garbs hiding their appearance and gender both, when they attacked the monster with a sword. Hidan stood in their way and fended off their weak swordplay with his own skills with blades, until they were disarmed, and skewered. But when Hidan's blade pierced the shinobi's heart, the body dissolved into smoke, and Hidan realized too late that it had been a shadow clone. Spinning around, he looked to find the real shinobi, and saw that it had already pierced through Kakuzu's monster with its sword, right through its side.

The monster, which had finally reached Kakuzu's corpse, let out a pained wail meant to echo through the forest, as it collapsed on top of its master's corpse. Hidan's own scream was just as pained, and sounded loud, thundering. He screamed still as he slaughtered the shinobi with chop after chop, making each cut too fast to evade or block, and to shallow to kill. His butchery was gruesome, but the shinobi's pain as they died was incomparable to the feeling in Hidan's own chest.

When the shinobi was finally dead, Hidan let the wakizashi stay in the bloody body, as he slumped down on the ground. Crying was something he had always belittled, but his pure frustration, and grief at his utter loss, manifested in tears still.

Unlike all else in life, Hidan's tears were silent, sobs hidden behind gritted teeth. His eyes were clenched firmly shut, and he clutched the place over his heart. He had a desire to reach inside his ribcage, rip the organ out and try to shove it inside of Kakuzu's corpse, but he knew that wouldn't work.

Hearts were personal, Kakuzu had once said, a queer thing to come from his mouth. It had been at the suggestion of Hidan's. Hidan had said "if you wanna be truly immortal, you could have my heart". And Kakuzu had been quiet, before stating that "hearts are personal. They can only ever sustain one life at a time. Your heart would be useless to me."

Hidan lacked the strength to turn around and look at the death behind him. Seeing Kakuzu's corpse at the morgue had been painful enough, even when he had retained his hope. But now, with the final heart and the corpse both dead and cold, he saved himself the terror of seeing it.

Wallowing in his sadness, Hidan stayed with his back turned to the corpse for some time. If more shinobi followed his trail of blood, he would kill them all the same, but he could not move. His mind felt empty, even as his tears had stopped, when he gazed at the nothingness ahead.

A grunt behind him made him flinch. The grunt was familiar, but he knew that it could not be so. Slowly, Hidan dared to look around, and he stared wide-eyed as Kakuzu's body rose. The mask of the monster shattered as the heart fully integrated with the body, and Hidan could hear it beating. He swallowed, in disbelief, as he looked up at Kakuzu's face. Kakuzu, with his bizarre, gorgeous eyes, looked back. Alive.


	9. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

"Hidan," Kakuzu said. He looked down at his old companion, bewildered and disoriented still over that fact that he was alive. He had died many times, but the last time had felt more final than any previous demise. Yet he stood, with a slow beating heart in his chest. It only took him a second to realize that the heart in his ribcage, beating inside of him for the first time in decades, was his original heart. Times had come when he had forgotten about it entirely, yet it felt familiar inside of him now, in a way no other heart had done.

"Kakuzu..." Hidan had been crying, Kakuzu noted. He had always assumed that grief was a feeling unknown to Hidan, whose arrogance and recklessness blinded him from all else. The reddened eyes told of a different story.

They were in a forest, still in the Land of Fire, and to his right, Kakuzu saw the ruins of Konoha, and to his left, only more unending forest. On the ground between him and Hidan he saw the corpse of a butchered shinobi of the leaf, whose blood stained Hidan's attire.

Hidan looked different than last time, Kakuzu could tell. Skinnier, dirtier, and without his scythe or any mark of Jashin. From the open kimono, Kakuzu saw that he had recently been stabbed through his chest, but he could see no marks on his body to match the torture of the corpse on the ground. Hidan had killed that one without saving any of the pain for himself, and without his ritual.

Before Kakuzu's haltered reflexes could prepare him for it, he found himself in Hidan's embrace. The shorter man's arms were tight around him in an uncharacteristic hug, but while Kakuzu felt no desire to return it, he lacked a will to push Hidan away.

The embrace came to an end and Hidan wiped his face with his arm, before grinning at Kakuzu, with the most innocent expression he had ever seen on Hidan's face.

"Fuck it's good to see you," Hidan announced. "You have no idea what I've been through, seriously, while you were just lying in a fucking morgue. I think I deserve some recognition. Come on."

Hidan had accompanied Kakuzu's heart, he reasoned. How that had happened, he didn't know yet, but it seemed to be the only explanation. Then Hidan had stolen his body from the morgue, and brought it here. But there was one thing which Kakuzu could not understand, as he puzzled every piece together.

"Why were you crying?"

"Ah, you saw that?" Hidan laughed in embarrassment. "Well I got a fucking kunai in the eye, and that's why I killed that son of a bitch, okay?" Hidan was a terrible liar, if allowed to speak, so Kakuzu let him prattle on. "It's not like that guy fucking stabbed your monster buddy right when I got to reunite you, and I forgot that he would've had to destroy the mask to kill it, or something stupid like that. Seriously, how dumb do you think I am?"

"You cried because you thought I was dead," Kakuzu stated. He expected a violent reaction, but instead, Hidan's gaze drifted to the ground.

"What the fucking ever," he said. "You're alive, so all's good, except you still haven't fucking thanked me."

"You didn't do your ritual," Kakuzu said. That took Hidan of surprise, and he looked at Kakuzu with a lost expression.

"I... oh fuck, I didn't! Jashin-sama's going to be fucking pissed! And it's all because of you, damn it, you fucking heathen." Yet there was no true passion to his words, and Kakuzu was well able to read between the lines.

Had he been a man to be flattered, he would have felt something akin to that at the notion that Hidan had tried to save him so feverishly that he had forgotten about his god. It seemed somewhat significant, taking Hidan's persona into account.

"Thank you." It was a word Kakuzu hadn't used in its proper form for even longer than when he parted with his original heart, yet it was the only word he could use at that time. He detested death, and being given his life back was a thing he could only feel gratitude towards. Even though it was Hidan he was thanking.

They locked eyes, Hidan's widened in shock, and time seemed to be stop. The winds of the forest were calm and quiet, and the animals seemed just as still.

"Yeah, well, it was your freaky little heart monster which saved me first," Hidan blurted out. "So there's no need to get sentimental and polite with me, fuck's sake. You can be such a softy, you know that? Deep inside."

"Thank you," Kakuzu repeated sincerely, countering Hidan's failed attempt to get a rise out of him with a raised eyebrow.

Hidan fell quiet, and he nodded, accepting the gratitude as if though he had never experienced it before. Without protest, he followed Kakuzu's order, when he said "Now let's go."

Together once more the immortal due left the Land of Fire. The memories of tears, the experience of a temporary death, and the triviality of demise, they left behind.

* * *

_Thank you so much for reading. _


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